Word: rundstedt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...generals is Hasso von Manteuffel, who in 1944 led the Fifth Panzer Army, one of the two spearheads of the battle. Manteuffel, 72, now lives in quiet retirement near Munich. He told Cate how he and other officers under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief West, protested that Hitler had set an impossible timetable by ordering a two-day rush to the Meuse, 50 miles distant. "Das ist unwiderruflich [This is irrevocable]," said General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations at supreme headquarters, slamming his fist on a conference table. Manteuffel, a dedicated bridge player, suggested that Hitler...
Hitler had a strong reason for not accepting the opinions of his generals. As Siegfried Westphal, Rundstedt's chief of staff and now a steel executive, told Cate: "The generals had been wrong about both Czechoslovakia and Poland. None of us believed that such blitz campaigns were possible. Even in France, the German military predicted that the campaign would last much more than six weeks. Hitler was proved right, and ever afterward he followed his own judgment. Naturally, France was the last time he was right...
...production, and Allied production made the defeat of Germany certain." General of the Infantry Georg Thomas, military chief of the German Office of Production related: "Bombing alone could not have defeated Germany, but without bombing the war would have lasted for years longer." And Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, von Rundstedt's successor as Commander-in-Chief of the West, admitted that "Dive bombing and terror attacks on civilians, combined with the heavy bombing, proved our undoing... Allied air power was the greatest single reason for the German defeat...